Mobile Autonomous Systems Laboratory
As taught in: January IAP 2005
The course logo. (Image courtesy of the course staff.)
Instructors:
This course is run by students, so there is no faculty member associated with this class.
MIT Course Number:
6.186
Level:
Course Features
Course Highlights
This course features extensive contest documentation in the study materials section. Team papers, together with team portraits and their respective robot portraits, are also provided in the projects section. This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.
Course Description
MASLab (Mobile Autonomous System Laboratory), also known as 6.186, is a robotics contest. The contest takes place during MIT's Independent Activities Period and participants earn 6 units of P/F credit and 6 Engineering Design Points. Teams of three to four students have less than a month to build and program sophisticated robots which must explore an unknown playing field and perform a series of tasks.
MASLab provides a significantly more difficult robotics problem than many other university-level robotics contests. Although students know the general size, shape, and color of the floors and walls, the students do not know the exact layout of the playing field. In addition, MASLab robots are completely autonomous, or in other words, the robots operate, calculate, and plan without human intervention. Finally, MASLab is one of the few robotics contests in the country to use a vision based robotics problem.
